Tree of Ideas

Tree of Ideas is a knowledge graph that maps how human thought moves across six domains: literature, philosophy, psychology, religion, mythology, and cinema. It follows characters, ideas, and archetypes from Homer to Goli Taraghi, from Plato to Camus, from Dostoevsky to Kafka — and tries to show where the same question, the same dream, the same shadow keeps reappearing.

Every page is a node in a web. A single novel hooks into a philosophical movement that surfaces in a film that echoes the same archetype as a much older myth.

The English tree is under construction — written from English-language sources, not translated from the Georgian side. Most of the graph still lives in Georgian; switch languages in the header to see the full map.

Where to Start

🌉 Cross-Bridges

The signature pieces. Each bridge is a multi-domain synthesis essay that runs one argument across literature, philosophy, psychology, and cinema end to end.

• Dostoevsky ↔ Freud ↔ Schopenhauer — the discovery of the unconscious in three registers: metaphysical (Schopenhauer’s Will), literary (the Underground Man), clinical (the death drive). The single most important inheritance the nineteenth century left to the twentieth.

The Georgian side has 5 bridges. EN bridges will arrive as their source material does — Camus now sits in the tree with three works, so the absurd axis is next up; Jung is now in the tree as well, so a Jung↔Freud↔Nietzsche bridge on the depth of the psyche is the natural next build; Brothers Karamazov remains the main remaining literary prerequisite.

🎭 Themes and Archetypes

Cross-cutting questions and figures that the works on this site keep returning to. Each theme is a node; the works are the spokes.

• The Shadow — the part of the self the self won’t look at; Jung’s archetype, Dostoevsky’s Underground Man, Travis Bickle, Joseph K.
• Alienation — separated from one’s own labor, will, body, world, or self; Hegel to Marx to Kafka to Sartre to Fromm
• The Absurd — the collision between the human demand for meaning and the world’s refusal to provide it
• Free Will and the Moral Law — Kant’s categorical imperative tested by Dostoevsky’s Raskolnikov and refused by Sartre
• Power and Morality — does the morality we teach our children apply to the people who govern us? Dostoevsky, Orwell, Huxley, Fromm

See the full themes index for what’s coming.

🔗 Through-Lines

A few axes run straight through the English content and are worth following end to end.

• The Russian satirical line. Gogol → Dostoevsky → Bulgakov → Kafka. A century of little men crushed by bureaucracies they can’t name, starting with The Overcoat and ending in [[the-trial|The Trial]]. “We all came out of Gogol’s overcoat,” Dostoevsky said. Kafka obsessively reread Dostoevsky. Bulgakov rewrote the whole inheritance inside Soviet Moscow — [[master-and-margarita|The Master and Margarita]] is Gogol’s grotesque + Dostoevsky’s Pilate chapters + Kafka’s impossible authority in one book.
• The epic spine. Homer → Rustaveli & Dante → Cervantes. [[the-iliad|The Iliad]] (c. 750 BCE) invents the heroic code and its ambivalence; [[the-odyssey|The Odyssey]] (c. 725 BCE) invents the wandering protagonist. A millennium later the code gets rebuilt under Christian pressure — Rustaveli (c. 1180–1210) keeps the warrior friendship but hangs it on Neoplatonic love; Dante (c. 1320) rewrites the Odyssey’s descent to Hades as a three-part journey toward divine love. Cervantes (1605) closes the tradition by burying it — the knight-errant played for comedy, his ideals showing through as the book goes on.
• The existential spine. Dostoevsky → Kafka → Sartre → Camus. The Underground Man’s diary becomes Joseph K.’s trial becomes Roquentin’s Nausea becomes Meursault’s beach. What nineteenth-century Russia dramatizes as theological crisis, twentieth-century France turns into phenomenological ontology, and then Camus turns into a moral ethic of lucid revolt. Read Crime and Punishment, The Trial, Nausea, and The Stranger in order and you have the argument.
• The absurd axis. Nietzsche → Kafka → Camus → Hemingway. The death of God produces a universe that refuses to answer. Kafka writes the silence as dream-logic ([[the-trial|The Trial]], [[a-hunger-artist|A Hunger Artist]]). Camus names it and proposes a response — lucid revolt, common decency, Sisyphus happy ([[the-myth-of-sisyphus|The Myth of Sisyphus]], [[the-stranger|The Stranger]], [[the-plague|The Plague]]). Hemingway’s [[the-old-man-and-the-sea|The Old Man and the Sea]] gives the same answer in a fisherman’s vocabulary: “destroyed but not defeated.” Four answers to the same silence, spanning ninety years.
• Kant’s shadow. Kant → Dostoevsky → Kafka → Sartre. The Categorical Imperative as a door the novelists keep trying to close and the existentialists keep trying to rebuild without the key. Ivan Karamazov, Joseph K., and Sartre’s abandoned student are all wrestling with the same Kantian demand.
• The pessimism spine. Kant → Schopenhauer → Tolstoy (late) & Mann → Freud. Schopenhauer takes Kant’s unknowable thing-in-itself, names it “Will,” and calls the result the worst of all possible worlds. [[the-world-as-will-and-representation|The World as Will]] is then absorbed by Russian literature (late Tolstoy’s renunciation) and German literature ([[buddenbrooks|Buddenbrooks]]’ slow family death), and finally, in [[beyond-the-pleasure-principle|Beyond the Pleasure Principle]], Freud rebuilds the same metaphysics inside a clinic and renames the Will the death drive.
• The Nietzsche axis. Schopenhauer → Nietzsche → Freud & Sartre & Kazantzakis. Schopenhauer’s will-to-live becomes Nietzsche’s will to power, and the pessimism is inverted into life-affirmation. [[human-all-too-human|Human, All Too Human]] (1878) breaks with metaphysics; [[the-dawn-of-day|The Dawn of Day]] (1881) starts the campaign against the morality of custom; [[thus-spoke-zarathustra|Thus Spoke Zarathustra]] (1883–85) proclaims the Übermensch and the eternal recurrence; [[beyond-good-and-evil|Beyond Good and Evil]] (1886) states the mature philosophy aphoristically; [[the-genealogy-of-morals|On the Genealogy of Morals]] (1887) supplies the single most important work of philosophical genealogy ever written. Downstream: Freud’s psychoanalysis is Nietzsche’s diagnostic method given a clinic; Sartre’s existentialism keeps the “death of God” premise and builds an ethics on the other side; Kazantzakis in his doctoral dissertation carries Nietzsche into modern Greek thought and then into his novels.
• The phenomenology line. Husserl → Sartre → Camus. The most influential philosophical method of the twentieth century starts as a technical project — describe what consciousness gives, before any theory imposes itself. [[logical-investigations|Logical Investigations]] (1900–01) breaks with psychologism and recovers ideal meaning; [[ideas-pure-phenomenology|Ideas I]] (1913) installs the transcendental reduction and turns phenomenology into a first philosophy of pure consciousness; [[the-crisis-of-european-sciences|The Crisis of European Sciences]] (1936) — written in Nazi-era exile — diagnoses what went wrong with European modernity by tracing the forgetting of the life-world under Galilean abstraction. Sartre then takes Husserl’s intentionality and existentializes it: [[nausea|Nausea]] is the life-world’s foreignness as fiction, [[being-and-nothingness|Being and Nothingness]] is its ontology. Camus inherits the same descriptive ethics: pay attention to the world before consoling yourself with concepts.
• Moral sentiment to political economy. Smith’s [[the-theory-of-moral-sentiments|Theory of Moral Sentiments]] (1759) and [[the-wealth-of-nations|Wealth of Nations]] (1776) form a single argument across two books: morality is grounded in sympathy and the internalized impartial spectator, and a society of such spectators, embedded in markets governed by competition and the division of labor, can produce general welfare. The same Smith later supplies Marx his critique-target and supplies Nietzsche, in [[the-genealogy-of-morals|On the Genealogy of Morals]], the “English psychologists” he attacks for grounding morality in utility. Smith’s moral psychology is the constructive ancestor; Nietzsche’s genealogy is the polemical successor.
• The unconscious line. Schopenhauer → Dostoevsky → Freud → Kafka & Proust. The nineteenth century discovers that the conscious self is a thin rider on something older and louder. Dostoevsky dramatizes it as the Underground; Freud gives it a method (the lectures, the dream book); modernist literature inherits both — [[the-trial|The Trial]] is Freud’s topographic model in dream-logic, and Proust’s involuntary memory is the unconscious announcing itself in a teacup.
• Civilization and its costs. Freud → Fromm → Orwell & Huxley. [[civilization-and-its-discontents|Civilization and Its Discontents]] and [[mass-psychology-and-other-writings|Mass Psychology]] diagnose the trade between security and happiness, the leader as ego-ideal, and aggression turned inward as guilt. [[escape-from-freedom|Escape from Freedom]] historicizes the diagnosis: Fromm asks why modern people, given freedom, flee it back into authoritarian submission or automaton conformity. [[nineteen-eighty-four|1984]] dramatizes the authoritarian escape route; [[brave-new-world|Brave New World]] dramatizes the conformist one. Same problem, opposite endpoints.
• The humanistic counter-tradition. Freud → Jung, Frankl, Fromm, Campbell. Four different mid-century moves out from under Freud’s biological determinism without losing the seriousness of his account of the unconscious. Jung breaks first — in 1913 — and builds analytical psychology on the claim that the unconscious is not a private storehouse but an inherited, universal substrate populated by archetypes. Frankl walks out of the camps with logotherapy and the will to meaning; Fromm crosses Freud with Marx in [[escape-from-freedom|Escape from Freedom]] to ask why modern freedom keeps producing flight from itself; Campbell goes to the world’s myths — explicitly through a Jungian frame — to recover the monomyth and the public structures of meaning that modernity dismantled. Four routes, one shared diagnosis: the modern self needs a meaning-bearing horizon, and when it does not have one it does not stay quiet.
• The depth-psychology split. Freud → Jung. The founding event of twentieth-century depth psychology: the 1913 break between the teacher and the Crown Prince. Freud keeps the unconscious small, biographical, sexual, and therapeutic; Jung keeps the unconscious large, collective, archetypal, and religious. [[a-general-introduction-to-psychoanalysis|Freud’s Introduction]] and [[the-archetypes-and-the-collective-unconscious|Jung’s Archetypes]] are the two canonical statements, a generation apart, of a single split that organized the rest of the century’s clinical thinking.
• The Lost Generation in English. Hemingway ↔ Remarque ↔ Fitzgerald ↔ Wolfe. Four survivors of the same collapse writing from different angles. [[the-sun-also-rises|The Sun Also Rises]] (1926) gives the generation its name and Hemingway’s signature — drifting expatriates, war wounds nobody discusses, grace under pressure. [[the-great-gatsby|The Great Gatsby]] (1925) is the same disillusionment as self-invention: the dream you chased turns out to have been behind you the whole time. [[a-farewell-to-arms|A Farewell to Arms]] and [[arch-of-triumph|Arch of Triumph]] round out the conversation from the front line. [[the-lost-boy|The Lost Boy]] (1937) is the other side of the generation — not Europe, not war, but an American South still mourning its dead, Wolfe’s short novella about a brother who died of typhoid in 1904 and the adult who tries, and fails, to recover him.
• The self-invented outsider. Stendhal → Dostoevsky → Tolstoy → Fitzgerald. The line of ambitious provincials who build a self out of theory, charm, or money, climb into a society that doesn’t actually want them, and break on arrival. Julien Sorel in [[the-red-and-the-black|The Red and the Black]] invents the pattern in 1830; Raskolnikov in [[crime-and-punishment|Crime and Punishment]] (1866) and Alexei in [[the-gambler|The Gambler]] (1867) radicalize it with philosophy and roulette; Olenin in Tolstoy’s [[the-cossacks|The Cossacks]] (1863) runs the inverse experiment — the civilized outsider trying to go native in the Caucasus, rejected by the wilderness he thought he wanted. Gatsby in [[the-great-gatsby|The Great Gatsby]] translates it into American money in 1925. All four end broken by the thing they had theorized about.
• Manufactured truth. Poe → Eco → Orwell. The line that takes the unreliable narrator seriously as a political problem. Poe invents the voice that sounds lucid while lying to itself — Tell-Tale Heart and the Imp of the Perverse. Eco scales it to a civilization — library as labyrinth of competing truths, a forged document that kills millions. Orwell institutionalizes it — the Ministry of Truth rewriting the past. Three steps from psychology to historiography to statecraft.
• The portrait and the double. Dostoevsky → Wilde. The doubling theme, once awaiting source material, now anchored. [[the-eternal-husband|The Eternal Husband]] (1870) — Dostoevsky’s tightest doubling study, Velchaninov and the husband who only exists as a betrayed husband. [[the-picture-of-dorian-gray|The Picture of Dorian Gray]] (1890) — the soul externalized into a portrait so the face can stay pure. Same formal discovery, two temperaments: Russian theological, English aesthetic.
• Totalitarian dystopia. Huxley → Orwell → Camus. Brave New World (1932) imagined the soft tyranny of pleasure; 1984 (1949) answered with the hard tyranny of pain. [[the-plague|The Plague]] (1947) sits between them as a different answer — totalitarianism read as pestilence, and the response read as unheroic common decency rather than prophetic resistance. The twentieth century tried all three registers.
• Fate, doom, and inherited curses. Homer → Tolkien. The oldest literary structure — divine malice weaponizing mortal pride — and its twentieth-century mythopoetic recovery. Achilles in [[the-iliad|The Iliad]] is the prototype; Túrin in [[the-children-of-hurin|The Children of Húrin]] is Tolkien’s Christian-Greek echo, the hero undone by the fit between his own hubris and Morgoth’s curse. Same formal discovery three millennia apart.

🎭 Themes Awaiting Source Material

Recurring problems that the EN tree references but that don’t yet have dedicated theme pages, because they need source material that hasn’t arrived yet.

• Nihilism — what happens when “everything is permitted.” Now covered through Nietzsche’s three mature books (especially [[the-genealogy-of-morals|On the Genealogy of Morals]]) and through Ivan Karamazov, Raskolnikov, Orwell’s O’Brien. (Dedicated page still awaiting Brothers Karamazov.)
• The Grand Inquisitor — Dostoevsky’s pressure test on Christianity: would people choose bread and certainty over freedom? Every totalitarian fiction after him is implicitly answering. (Awaiting Brothers Karamazov.)
• The Übermensch and eternal recurrence — the figure who has overcome slave morality, and the thought-test that distinguishes him. Now covered in [[thus-spoke-zarathustra|Thus Spoke Zarathustra]] and Nietzsche’s page; Power and Morality carries the political consequences. (Dedicated theme page still to come.)
• Resentment (Ressentiment) — the slave’s revaluation of values, the source of modern morality. Now covered through [[the-genealogy-of-morals|On the Genealogy of Morals]] and Power and Morality. (Dedicated theme page still to come.)
• The Doppelgänger — the double, the literary form of the Shadow. Now anchored through [[the-eternal-husband|The Eternal Husband]] and [[the-picture-of-dorian-gray|The Picture of Dorian Gray]]. (Dedicated theme page still to come; Dostoevsky’s The Double and Conrad’s The Secret Sharer would strengthen it further.)
• Theodicy — God and the problem of evil. (Awaiting Kierkegaard, Job, theology pages.)

Why “Tree of Ideas”?

The Georgian title for this project is იდეათა ხეივანი — literally an avenue of ideas, a tree-lined promenade you walk through. The image matters: this is not a hierarchical tree with one trunk and branches radiating out, but a long cultivated path with many trees standing side by side. Dostoevsky next to Freud next to Tarkovsky. You don’t climb it; you wander it.

Connections run along two axes.

• Horizontal — one idea moving across domains within the same era. Dostoevsky ↔ existentialism ↔ Taxi Driver: one century, three media, the same crisis.
• Vertical — the same theme moving down through eras. Greek tragedy → Dostoevsky → Scorsese: one question, three cultures, three forms.

Every page tries to answer one question: what role does this figure or work play in the long avenue of human thought?

Full Catalogue — English Pages

Literature — Authors

Literature — Works, by Era

Ancient

Medieval

Renaissance

Sturm und Drang / Weimar Classicism

19th Century

Early Modernism (1900–1930)

Late Modernism (1930–1950)

Post-war and Contemporary

Philosophy — Philosophers

Philosophy — Works

Psychology — Psychologists

Psychology — Works

Mythology — Scholars

Mythology — Texts

Cinema — Directors

Cinema — Films

Movements

Literature: Russian Realism · French Realism · Modernism · Lost Generation · Dystopian Fiction · Soviet Satire

Philosophy: German Idealism · Pessimism · Existentialism · Phenomenology

Psychology: Psychoanalysis

Cinema: New Hollywood · Russian Poetic Cinema · Swedish Art Cinema · Japanese Golden Age

Eras

Ancient · Medieval · Renaissance · Enlightenment · Romanticism · 19th Century · Early Modernism · Late Modernism · Post-war · Contemporary

Topic Indexes

• Literature
• Philosophy
• Psychology
• Cinema
• Eras
• Mythology
• Themes and Archetypes
• Religion — stub

The Georgian side of the site has hundreds of pages and the full cross-domain graph — mythology, cinema, religion, psychology, Georgian literature. Click ქარ in the sidebar to switch.